Lumileds football competition launches: It’s All About Quality
Published: 15 June, 2021
With a Summer of European International Football ahead of us, Lumileds - who are licensed to manufacture and market Philips Automotive Lighting products - are launching a football skills competition where the best entries will win Tournament Footballs.
The competition asks people to show off the quality of their footballing skills, in whatever way they want, on a video, which can win them one of the hundreds of the footballs in the prize pool. It’s obviously a fun activity, yet the underlying message for the automotive aftermarket is a simple but serious one - “It’s All About Quality.”
Lumileds Brand Ambassador, Andy Savva - a.k.a The Garage Inspector - is launching the competition with a video, which promotes the “It’s All About Quality” message, as far as vehicle lighting is concerned. There could be few people better qualified to deliver this message, because before Andy went into the automotive industry and became a successful garage owner, he was once on the books of a leading Premiership Football club - before injury curtailed his professional football aspirations.
Andy’s Garage Inspector role sees him educating garages in best practice across all aspects of their business. “I came to understand very quickly, that quality is critical in running a successful garage business, whether that be for customer service, running a workshop, administering and marketing your business, or the core activity of repairing and maintaining cars. Fitting the right parts is a key aspect of this - you can’t do the best job for the customer - or your business - if you fit poor quality parts. Cheap is rarely good - especially with car lighting, as a failed replacement bulb will result in both time lost in replacing it again and lowered customer confidence. It’s all about being cost effective - for all parties.”
View the video HERE:
The “It’s All About Quality” Football skills competition will run until 11 July, the final day of Europe’s major football international tournament. Competitors can enter by sending their quality skills videos to media@chicane.marketing
Running any business, and perhaps more so a service business like an independent garage, you have to learn to recognise there are different types of customers with different expectations.
How we deal and adapt our services, the customer journey to meet and exceed these expectations are essential if we are going to succeed in having a healthy profitable business. This function must be adopted by everyone in your garage regardless of size.
Occasionally however, we are faced with challenging customers who complain, usually in a passive aggressive manner. These customers feel they have a reason to be upset. I always used to say to my team at Brunswick Garage, that there will always be a small percentage of customers that we will never be able to please, and importantly we must not let these handful of customers taint our view of all customers. When you find yourself having to deal with a disgruntled customer, remembering a few simple techniques can help to defuse the situation. Both parties being upset and defensive will not amount to anything positive.
Listen In my experience running independent garages, I came to the realisation that in virtually every case of an unhappy customer, all that was needed to resolve the customer concern was to listen to the customer, or recognise actually they weren’t being listened to.
The customer isn’t always right, but it’s not always okay to tell them that, sometimes you have to act as if they are right. Active listening, eye contact, nodding your head in agreement, being on the same level with them, expressing empathy, and relating to how the customer is feeling can be incredibly helpful. Remember to place yourself in the customer’s position or frame of mind and never patronise a customer or look for excuses. We are working in an industry where many aspects of the customer journey have to come together from the initial phone call to returning the customers vehicle keys, so we have to accept that sometimes things go wrong however much we try to avoid mistakes.
Rapport Once you have been able to establish some rapport, you may find a mutually agreeable resolution to the problem, and you must do whatever you can to achieve this outcome. Explain to the customer what you are going to do to help the situation. It could be engaging the customer in a test drive to better understand the complaint, admitting the garage made a mistake, or if possible, offering the customer a lift back home, work or a loan vehicle while you resolve their issue. You must assure at all times the customer feels that you are truly trying your best to resolve their concern and provide them with the least convenience as possible.
Research indicates that customers prefer the person they are speaking with to instantly solve their problem. However sometimes complaints have to be moved up the chain of command, but make sure they don’t add to the customer's frustration. So, wherever possible, resolve the issue yourself. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to those senior to you that you are willing to manage difficult situations yourself without resorting to escalation.
If you really can’t solve the customers concerns, take ownership of the issue and ensure that the complaint is effectively escalated and that you follow up to see what the outcome is.
It’s also worth mentioning that if you say you are going to do something, you should always do it. Don’t be tempted to tell customers that someone will get in touch with them in an hour when they might not get a call for a few hours. The customer won’t thank you for it in the long run. Always be sure you can meet the promise you make.
Perspective Many of us have worked in the automotive sector for so long we forget what it is like to bring our vehicle for repair. Knowing what your competition is doing can also pay dividends in other ways too. It can help you set yourself apart by creating a business experience, an atmosphere that is different from any other garage locally and far beyond.
Keeping perspective when it comes to the customer experience will help you to create a positive customer experience and maintain a solid customer base. At Brunswick Garage we were of course never happy to receive complaints, however we used it as a prompt to better our service and if a customer made the effort to write or email us with a concern, we displayed their comments in reception with the thank you letters. We wanted to show our customers that we were not perfect, but also show them we took complaints very seriously and we always aimed at achieving a positive outcome. Learning to handle challenging customers will build respect for your business and ultimately result in higher customer retention and profits.
Positive/negative When we receive complaints, we often look upon them in a negative way. However, complaints can be really useful to any garage and although it doesn’t feel like it at the time, the complaint is extremely positive in that it helps highlight problems with our service and procedures.
The alternative to receiving customer complaints is not receiving them and carrying on just the way we are, oblivious the negative impact our actions are having on customers who perhaps won’t return or will be complaining to their friends rather than to us. This is extremely damaging as we never get the chance to put right the errors that we don’t hear about. It’s a bit of a cliché, but complaints really are a gift.
Do you work in a quality business? Or a quantity business? Is it possible to have a garage business that has both? How do we define quality for that matter? You see everyone’s perception of quality is different, which makes it difficult to work towards a particular grade of quality.
If you examine the excellence and quality movements in detail as I have in the last 15 years or so, you will see that what the really offer is to turn back the clock, applying the standards of bygone days to today’s profit-based material age. The premise is that if you get back to product or service supremacy through quality you cannot fail. Sadly, it is an entirely false premise.
Customer satisfaction is no longer enough. Satisfied customers are not loyal customers. They shop around – they may like you, but not enough to resist the temptations of your competitors. Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They become advocates for your garage.
Companies who have such customers have managed to create a customer experience that is consistent, intentional, differentiated, and valuable. To do this they use all aspects of the business, marketing, operations, and the most important factor the human element.
Superior service You could have a quality product or service but if not matched with a superior WOW factor service experience you have no hope in succeeding. Let me give you an example, Curry’s sell quality products, yet the service in most cases and what I have experienced is really lacking. These stores are huge, selling hundreds of lines yet hardly anyone works in them, and if you do find someone to assist you they have very little product knowledge.
Now, take off your business hat and ask yourself, as a consumer, how many genuine quality businesses do you know? If you can think of one, perhaps even two or three, where you are constantly and consistently super-impressed, not just with what they do but how they do it, you are doing well. You have seen the WOW factor at work. You may even have glimpsed a miracle. My guess is that you will be thinking of a business that puts its relationship-building substantially in front of making the next sale.
These are the kind of businesses that share one of my philosophies about customers: that it’s far better to concentrate on what you do for customers than what you do to customers. Despite all the new technology, and the mind-blowing rise of call centres which in my view do very little in increasing the customer experience and other magic customer service-enhancing devices, companies still frequently fail their customers.
The reason is not so often that the computer system has gone down, although that happens frequently enough!) it is mostly because the culture, philosophy and ideals do not exist. When this happens, it’s a people issue.
People power For those involved in selling, and that’s what we do in our garage businesses, this is a mammoth task. Selling has, it seems, been quantity-driven since time began; but, in the last 20 years, it has become quantity-obsessed. This obsession has, in my view, led to practices and standards in our garage sector that can barely be justified. There is no mitigation. We are all to blame. We have all seen the £99 service, MOT, three-course meal and the kitchen sink deal. Someone please explain to me how anyone can charge so little and offer a quality WOW Factor experience?
Given the choice – and they will be – no customer in their right mind would want to deal with a person driven by quantity objectives. Customers already know that, so often, quantity objectives work against quality objectives. Look at the classic high-commission businesses and the reputation they have: double-glazing or perhaps even office equipment. There are many more, including, sadly in our garage sector.
What next? Find where you and your business are, and remember it well. If you do nothing to give your customers the WOW Factor, the future has some difficult and frightening times ahead, times of uncertainty and high risk.
Far be it for me to put the fear of God into you about the future, but that’s exactly what I think might need to happen. I, and many others before me, have pointed to change being the cause of this fear. Not just change itself, but its rate and frequency and scope. In such circumstances you must look to make yourself and your business stronger, more resilient. I have two suggestions for this.
The first lies in your business process, I witness so many garages lack of processes that do not consider the customer journey and the impact it has on them.
The second lies in the quality objectives you need to create that are understood and breathed by everyone in your business. For one aspect of the quantity/quality discussion we have not considered is this; quantity only builds immediate sales; quality builds friends. Friends, in the long term, build greater quantity, which yields the miracles that create the WOW factor.
Lastly, just before I end this article, Id like to point something out. It may seem obvious, but don’t look for a switch. There isn’t one. You can’t turn a miracle on. There is nothing anyone can flick to change your environment from quantity driven to customer driven. It is truly a pendulum. The only thing you need to know about this pendulum is that its relentless: It was for me running my last garage business it was actually unstoppable.
In a first for automotive training, Lincoln College is to begin incorporating The Garage Inspector business courses from Andy Savva into its automotive training programme, in order to help bring through the next generation of garage owners.
